Loving others via tracked changes and precedents

Week beginning: 14th May, 2017 | By Dominic Hughes | London

Have you ever considered how doing your job as a lawyer can be a way of loving your neighbour?

The author Lester DeKoster once posed a thought experiment:

"[Look at that] chair you are lounging in … Could you have made it for yourself? … How [would you] get, say, the wood? Go and fell a tree? But only after first making the tools for that, and putting together some kind of vehicle to haul the wood, and constructing a mill to do the lumber, and roads to drive on…? In short, a lifetime or two to make one chair! … Imagine that everyone quits working right now! What happens? Civilised life quickly melts away." (*)

Some might joke that the world would be a better place without lawyers. But the reality is that – this side of eternity – it would be chaos.

And even more so if we lost all the lawyers who had their hearts set on God.

If we are to love our neighbour by doing our job as lawyers, our hearts must be set on God first of all (and thus be wary of blindly adopting the secular world's viewpoint about what good lawyering looks like). Remember that loving our neighbour as ourselves is the second greatest commandment. The first is in the verse beforehand and involves loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. The more we love Him, the more we will see how best to love our neighbours in and through our work as lawyers.